


en passant

by eleionomae



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Huddling For Warmth, M/M, pwp that also kind of has half a plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 09:46:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6047049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleionomae/pseuds/eleionomae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A storm and a broken supply cart maroon the Inquisitor's party in the Fereldan backcountry. Solas takes the opportunity to compromise all of his morals.</p><p>Or: that time Lavellan and Solas shared a bed and accidentally fucked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	en passant

The Mire casts a long shadow across the Fereldan backwoods. They're half a day from the base camp before the soot-gray vanguard of stormclouds finally thins out enough to give the party a full ten glorious minutes of weak, watery sunlight—nothing worth remarking on out loud, but everyone must be a little heartened by it anyway because the animals make better time than Lavellan had planned for and Solas can hear Blackwall humming to himself beneath the pit-pat of rain on the cheatgrass.  
  
When the rain and wind marshal again, Varric consoles his irritated horse with a pat, managing to sound good-humored despite the puddles forming in the brim of his hat. It's bad, but it's not _Fallow Mire_ bad. “I'm chafing in crevices I didn't know I  had. You really don't pay me enough for this shit.”  
  
Lavellan laughs, his hair steadily flattening until the slender strip of nape Solas had been staring at since their departure out of the marsh is no longer visible. He wishes he did not mourn the loss as much as he does, but the rest of the view features only miles of overgrazed farmland, hayricks, and the occasional, improbable sprig of elfroot in every other direction. “Varric, the Inquisition technically doesn't pay you _anything_.”  
  
“I know! Some people call that indentured servitude.”  
  
“We'll stop in Redcliffe and Blackwall will buy you all the mid-priced ale you can drink.”  
  
Blackwall chuffs out a laugh from several paces behind them all, his resting voice somehow louder than the faint hiss of the wind that blows all around them. “Not sure the two-bit at the Gull is any better than bogwater. And why, exactly, am I buying?”  
  
“You dumped Varric and I into the lake at Granite Point. Is that a good enough excuse?”  
  
“I—that was—”  
  
“To be fair, he could hardly have been expected to forsee the dock collapsing as soon as he stepped onto it,” Solas interjects, dodging Lavellan's theatrically wounded look by turning his attention to the loose ties on his armguard. “...I will concede, however, that there _was_ an unpleasant amount of corpses that followed.”  
  
“At least nine,” says Lavellan. “Just awful.”  
  
“The worst,” Varric agrees.  
  
“Right,” laughs the Warden, never one to be ill-tempered about finding himself the butt of a joke. “Mid-priced Fereldan bogwater for everyone it is.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
The mood doesn't last. The sky blackens, the storm swells, and the road is soon a long track of mud that cakes up around the exhausted carthorse's knees. Blackwall and Lavellan dismount to hurriedly offload a few of the cheaper pieces of looted weaponry into a nearby ditch, but they barely make it another mile when the cart suddenly judders to a stop at the head of the train, Lavellan's hart balking in alarm. Lavellan manages to stay in the saddle until it calms, but it's obvious something is wrong with either the horse or the cart, and there is no reliable cover to be had for miles; sitting still is an open invitation to any group of passing bandits who can boast a half-decent pair of archers.  
  
“That didn't sound good,” says Varric, somewhat redundantly, the only member of the party who elects not to dismount. Solas beelines for the horse, gripping its halter and carefully smoothing a hand down the length of its mud-daubed neck, its eyes rolling wetly in their sockets. Eventually it settles enough to let Solas tuck its head into his neck while Lavellan and Blackwall undo each buckle on the harness to free it, its breath a long, warm flood against his arm.  
  
The sky belches out a deafening peal of thunder overhead, and the carthorse weathers a full-body twitch against him, nowhere near as disciplined as the other mounts, who are stoically cropping at the grass where their owners left them. Solas lifts his gaze in time to see Blackwall and Lavellan regard each other miserably across the yoke of the cart, the rain running down their faces in streams.  
  
“We won't have light for much longer,” Lavellan sighs, pushing a skein of hair out of his eyes. The skin at the base of his throat pebbles into goosebumps, and Solas wonders, despite himself, how it would taste if he could lick the rain out of the hollow of his clavicle.  
  
But that's an image for later; he glances instead back over his shoulder, first to case the land around them, then to look meaningfully at Varric. “This was pastureland once. There will be farmsteads nearby.”  
  
“If they weren't all demolished during the war,” says Blackwall, his arms full of leather harnessing, squinting through the sharp beads of rain that seem to fall at the perfect angle to pitch right into their eyes.  
  
“Do we have a choice?” Varric snorts, tipping his head to the side to dump out the pool that's gathered in his hat. “Come on, Chuckles, I don't think we're much use here.”  
  
It's not exactly the wisest plan, splitting their party, but Lavellan makes a halfhearted gesture of assent in Varric's direction, already kneeling to inspect the underside of the cart, his staff in one hand, glowing abrasively brightly against the gathering darkness. Mouth thin, Blackwall pulls a few canvas knapsacks of rations out of the wagon bed and moves to stow them into Solas's saddlebags, apologetically scratching at the hart's flank as he passes.  
  
“Lavellan,” Solas says, wrapping the carthorse's lead around one hand and gently guiding it along before he mounts up again, his fur stole already beginning to smell like wet animal and must. “If we do not return within the hour—”  
  
“I'll send Blackwall out after you. There should be a river to the east of us, use that as your mark if you have to.” Another groan of thunder shakes the ground, and Lavellan swears quietly under his breath, wiping the rain out of his face. “Go, we're losing light.”  
  
Instinct tells him to argue, but Solas exhales quietly, taps his hart to a canter with the carthorse clomping steadily abreast of them, and studiously does not think about what kind of physical vengeance Cassandra will visit upon him—or, more likely, upon Varric—if they manage to lose the Inquisitor to a fatal mix of questionable decision-making and an ill-timed thunderstorm.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
They do, somehow and with suspiciously little effort, manage to find a serviceable farmhouse: a tall, boxy structure stubbornly resisting the driving winds that worry the long, unmown grass all around it, but the wood planks of the roof beneath its mildew-eaten thatching are whole and the boarding over the windows lacks any evidence of past break-ins. Only the rain-swollen door resists Varric's attempts to shoulder it aside, so Solas pokes at the jamb with the blade of his staff until he finds enough purchase to lever it open, and beyond a smear of dirt at the threshold, everything is surprisingly neat when they cautiously wend inside.  
  
“Shit. I never thought I'd be this happy to have to break-and-enter,” Varric breathes, already shucking his coat and proceeding into the main room. There are wedges of firewood in the grate, as if someone had abandoned the entire house in the middle of their morning chores, but they're damp when Solas kneels to light them, so he slides the grate aside and unrolls a ration pack to sacrifice the canvas as kindling. Eager to offer aid, Varric shuttles a stool over and pulls down a rather expensive-looking oil painting of a wyvern from over the mantel, then lobs the frame into the fire, too, his wet hair rapidly falling out of its tie.  
  
“I'll go unload the horses and get them settled in the barn. You think you can get the Inquisitor and Blackwall here?”  
  
“If they do not find us themselves.” The fire steadily crawls up the roll of cloth, then begins to follow the line of the picture frame; he sits back a moment to give his hands and feet some time to regain feeling, watching the firelight make flickering shadows against the rafters. Their bedrolls are likely soaked through, but he can see at least two beds strategically placed at either sides of the second level of the house, where they might make the most of the heat of the hearth overnight. Not terrible. Certainly good enough for a two-day rest, if Lavellan decides to fix the cart himself. “I notice you were quick to volunteer me for the task,” he adds, smiling.  
  
“Hey, I know what I'm good at, and I'm not good at riding out for a rescue mission in the middle of a tempest,” Varric laughs, re-arranging his hair into its ponytail and inspecting the furniture—the little table and carved chair set near the stone oven, still black with ashes, the linen chest beneath the far window, then each stair that leads up to the loft. A few creak a little ominously, but he makes it up and then plods back down without anything breaking. “I mean, I would, if you'd really rather.”  
  
“This is hardly a tempest, but I take your point.” When his fingers can close into a fist again, Solas pulls himself up, dragging a chair back from the small kitchen area and draping his pelt over the back of it to dry. What cookware he can find suffered for lack of maintenace; he sets their own stew pot onto the fire, fills it with the contents of his own waterskin and their last half-bag of lentils, finding, when he looks up, that Varric is gone again, the door carefully shut behind him.  
  
He means only to stay long enough to ward the windows and the doorway, but the rattling of wheels on the other side of the walls breaks his focus. The other two, he thinks, peering out of the door in time to catch Varric heading up the dirt path again, scraping his bootsoles on the lower part of the fence that runs against the broad side of the house. Lavellan's staff makes a beacon against the darkness, the rain that swirls around him bright as snowflakes in the glow of raw mana.  
  
“Did they _drag_ that thing all the way up here? Man, we really shouldn't have left them behind,” Varric laughs, probably genuinely devastated about having to trek outside in the pitch black. “I think they've got everything handled, let's just go inside so we don't let the heat out.”  
  
Solas feels his mouth thin, but the unfinished wards do gnaw at him; he sighs off the impulse to go out and help them haul the cart up the last few feet of road and shadows back inside, content to let Lavellan needlessly complicate things for himself yet again.  
  


* * *

  
  
Both Blackwall and Lavellan look about as formidable as wet cats when they finally make it into the house, mud scudding the thick braided rug under their boots. Blackwall guides the door shut behind him and the two set themselves to peeling off their outer layers in silence, shuddering when a gust of wind rattles the windows as if they can still feel it beating at them.  
  
“Well?” says Varric, comfortably sharing chairspace with Solas's mantle, his own coat and gloves spread out a few hand spans away from the fire, the leather slick in the light.  
  
“The reach split and the wagonbed is caving. Not an easy repair on the road with the tools we packed,” murmurs Lavellan, apparently too abashed by present company to remove his breeches and his sopping linen undershirt, which is functionally transparent where it sticks to his stomach. A single hateful fold covers the plane of skin beneath his navel. “Maybe if there were people living here, but as there aren't, we'll either abandon it, or... I'm not sure, nail a few planks together and hope it survives the uphill road to Skyhold.”  
  
It's hard not to watch him; Solas scrabbles for a reason to justify it. “We can carry the healing elixirs and lyrium potions on our own,” he says at last, finding that the will to try to solve this increasingly ridiculous non-issue so late into the evening evades him. “We needn't trouble the horses with the rest.”  
  
“I know, but I hate the idea of leaving so many weapons behind. I don't want to accidentally arm a band of passing highwaymen.”  
  
Everyone else must be about as disinterested in the conversation as he is, because they lapse into silence again. Blackwall is naked to the waist when he finally moves towards the fire, spreading out his gambeson and hose next to Varric's.  
  
“Not a bad setup,” he snorts, regarding the stew pot cooking on the rust-speckled trivet. “Are there beds?”  
  
“Two,” says Solas, trying to forget Lavellan ranging the length of the hut in only a tissue-thin shirt and soft kidskin pants. “And a basin, if that appeals.”  
  
Lavellan sighs, shuts some unseen door. “And a pantry full of weevil-infested millet sacks.”  
  
“Anyway,” Varric says pointedly, glancing around at the remaining three. “Rock-paper-scissors you guys for a bed?”  
  
“Oh, just take one. Blackwall is going to insist on sleeping near the door anyway.”  
  
“You're the divinely-elected mouthpiece of Andraste. Don't wake me anytime before noon.” Varric puts both hands up in a gesture of surrender to the Inquisitor's divine will before excusing himself to the staircase, and no more is heard from him after—Blackwall has already begun to toast a remaining heel of bread from the last Inquisition camp, too exhausted to do much more than join the unenthusiastic chorus of 'good night's from Solas and Lavellan.  
  
“I think I'll follow Varric's example,” Lavellan says, too quickly after, companionably clapping Blackwall's shoulder as he weaves through the haphazard arrangement of clothes drying over various bits of furniture. It's likely he doesn't mean for Solas to notice, but he takes his own bedroll off the last chair, tucking it beneath his arm as he departs for the second floor. “We'll figure everything out in the morning. There are still blankets in the chest if you'd like to make pallets down here—I doubt anyone is coming back for them.”  
  
An opening. Solas weighs the merits of following him up before he can get situated on the floor, but Blackwall's presence makes him cautious. They sit in drowsy silence, neither of them especially inclined to filling silence with small talk; he only hopes it isn't terminally obvious that he's listening for the sounds of Lavellan moving around above them until they finally peter out for good.  
  
When he can no longer suffer the constant loop of _should I_ or _shouldn't I_ in his mind, he slips away from the fire, empties the closets of their last few stacks of linens, then divides them to set down half beside Blackwall. “The wards are primed, we shouldn't be troubled by anything short of a High Dragon,” he says in passing, halfway out of earshot by the time Blackwall tears his rapt attention from the fire to respond with something that might well just be a single syllable of acknowledgement, his heartbeat somehow in his ears and his throat at once.  
  
In some ways, he thinks, he'd prefer the dragon.  
  


* * *

  
  
Lavellan is awake and reading on his bedroll by the light of the Anchor when Solas finally climbs the stairs.  
  
“That must be damp,” he says, low enough to keep the conversation out of earshot of Blackwall over Varric's snoring on the other side of the loft. “I assumed you would take the bed.”  
  
“I didn't want to presume,” he says, not looking up from the pageface. Loaded wording, Solas realizes too late. That hazy, snow-flecked dream of Haven is a heavy weight between them, and he wonders, guiltily, what part of it Lavellan regrets so much that he lets himself be uncharacteristically skittish about it now. “I slept on the ground every day for thirty years, I can manage one or two more.”  
  
His shirt is finally dry. The hem has ridden up a bit, only the breadth of a few fingers, but enough Solas can see the waxy outline of a hipbone, and it makes him some unspeakable mix of hungry and selfish. He could touch it, press his fingers into the soft skin of his belly until it bruised, make Lavellan gasp against his mouth.  
  
He must be disgustingly obvious, but Lavellan lets him have the illusion of distance, turning a page and tilting his palm forward to adjust the glow.  
  
“There is a better solution,” Solas finally offers, moving to the bed and patting out the hide covering of the mattress in case of any unseen bugs nesting within the straw, satisfied enough to pull a few linens over it when nothing stirs. Lavellan watches him curiously over the top of his book—an ancient issue of _Masqued Murmurs Monthly_ , pulled from the bookshelf at his back, as evidenced by the conspicuous gap in the middle row—eyes like oil slicks in the uncertain light of the hovel.  
  
“All right,” he says at length, perhaps too tired to make a token protest. He averts his gaze when Solas begins to remove his tunic and tucks his boots beneath the bed, hilariously modest for a man whose bedsheets have been the subject of the chambermaids' scrutiny every day since Haven. Then he takes the far side of the bed, hemmed in by the wall at one arm and by Solas at the other when he lays down beside him, shivering in the night chill, and for a few moments the both of them can pretend there is no oppressive sexual tension leftover from those precious few seconds they had let themselves be honest in the courtyard of Haven's chantry.  
  
But Lavellan folds first, turning over to face the wall before any sustained eye contact can push him into going back to his bedroll. This, Solas discovers exactly two seconds later, is not better: the dim firelight that filters up from the first floor shades his bare neck and collar a soft gold, his skin in goosebumps again, and without Lavellan's attention to shame him into behaving, he can watch the pulse beneath his jaw, the solid column of his vertebrae marching down into the slope of his back as long as he pleases.  
  
He dozes, but not deeply enough to dream; the fire has dimmed enough that the hovel is mostly in darkness when he feels Lavellan turn over again to move in sleep as he could not make himself do awake, so close now that his slow, even breath dampens Solas's shoulder. His hair smells like grass and wet earth; his skin is exactly as soft as he had let himself imagine when he finally drapes an arm over his side to nudge Lavellan closer. Too aggressive, he realizes a second later. Lavellan's breath catches, and Solas watches as if from a great distance as one molten eye opens reluctantly.  
  
They lay pressed together, Lavellan in his miserable deficit of body heat, Solas in his equally miserable deficit of principles, perhaps finally too tired to fight the tide.  
  
“We agreed,” Lavellan begins, and then founders. “We agreed we would stay friends.”  
  
“We did.” The knowledge that this is likely his last chance to take a definitive stance with Lavellan wars with the ever-present guilt of the lie. Is pursuing him now worse than everything else he had done, would do? How much atonement did serving the Inquisition's interests merit him? Enough to justify fucking Lavellan, loving Lavellan? No argument feels better or worse than the other, and there is no room for introspection on this tiny, borrowed bed.  
  
“Solas.” Lavellan strains against him, lips hovering just over the corner of Solas's mouth. His fingers curl into his undershirt, hard enough that the seams at the sleeve threaten to snap, as if trying to steady the tremor in his hands that may or may not be from the cold. “Commit, or don't. Make this decision, because I can't.”  
  
It leaves his mouth before he can stop himself. A reflex to be honest that flies in the face of all sense; he'll have to train that out of his system at some point. “Why should you not?”  
  
Against him, Lavellan stiffens, huffing out a disbelieving laugh that ends up being a little too loud for the dead stillness of the rest of the house. His voice drops back to a whisper when he decides to go ahead and state the obvious for the benefit of absolutely no one. Maybe one day he'll stop and remember this moment, wonder why he hadn't picked up on the misstep. “You work for me. And you—rejected me once.”  
  
_Enough_ , Solas thinks, mostly to himself. It shouldn't be Lavellan's self-pity that moves him, but it does, and it should be Lavellan who breaks the stalemate, but it isn't—he crushes their lips together and pins Lavellan down with his folded arm pressed to his chest, luxuriating in the feeling of Lavellan's heart slamming at his elbow. It's at least decisive, which is more than he can say for most of his life choices, especially recently, and he doesn't regret it when he pulls back enough to watch Lavellan's face and neck flush, the two of them in dazed stasis on the other side of this stupid, impossible divide.  
  
His lip stings; he realizes too late that Lavellan must have bitten him hard enough to split it. “Solas,” he says again, a little carefully. The sharp edge in his voice, so full of bravado, heats Solas's blood. He tries so hard to be above reproach even in these soft, private moments, and for a moment Solas wants to ask him, _what were you like, before all of this_?  
  
But Lavellan tilts his hips, already hard, no longer fighting Solas's grip on him, and the thought is lost. He shudders when a particularly hard gust of wind sneaks in through a nearby hole in the wall, so Solas pulls the blankets back over the both of them, wrenching Lavellan's back to his chest and kneading the heel of his hand up and down the placket of Lavellan's breeches to pacify him.  
  
The effect is instantaneous; Lavellan chokes out a groan, caught between bucking backwards against Solas or forward into his hand. On a better day, he could roll him out under the full sunlight, match reality to imagination, but this has to be enough in the meantime: he withdraws his hand to finally slip it beneath Lavellan's shirt, clawing stripes across his belly that will linger until morning.  
  
“Angry about your lip?” Lavellan laughs, breaking off into another desperate sigh when Solas mouths at his neck. Varric sleeps like the dead, and there is just enough space between the two of them and Blackwall one floor down to give them plausible deniability if they need it later, but he really doesn't want to alienate their traveling companions, so he claps one hand over Lavellan's mouth before he sets his jaw and _bites_ , savoring the half-second of resistance before the skin yields and he tastes the blood beading on his tongue.  
  
His foresight pays off—Lavellan seizes in his arms, shouting against Solas's palm, breaths coming rapidly one after the other. Beneath them, the stuffing of the mattress crackles, no help in keeping discretion, but Varric mumbles something, the squealing of his bedframe as he turns over not enough to stir him, so Solas keeps the pace before he can second-guess himself.  
  
_As though you could walk away now_ , some crueler part of him spits, preemptively angry at himself for this obvious lapse in judgment. Lavellan's chest heaves, radiating heat as if he might accidentally immolate the bookcase at any second, one leg desperately hooking with Solas's. It's easy to fold his knee up, seating Lavellan on his thigh, his own breath catching in surprise when Lavellan braces himself against the bed and pistons down against him.  
  
“What do you want?” Solas goads against his ear, painfully hard, too, thumbing the line of Lavellan's lower lip before he frees him to respond, his hand lazily moving to his skinny hip, tracing the indents left by his breeches.  
  
“In me,” Lavellan says, desperate enough for candor. Too good. “Can you?”  
  
Solas soundlessly pulls in air through his clenched teeth, his nails leaving a pattern like Orlesian lacework where he grips him, waiting out the time it takes for him to be sure he can respond as tonelessly as possible. “Can _you_?”  
  
“Please,” comes the reply, which, while not the definitive _yes_ Solas had wanted, is a lot more personally satisfying. Long seconds drag by, Lavellan corkscrewing his hips down into Solas's knee, Solas's mouth against his earlobe, and probably he could come from just that, the two of them breathing in sync, bodies cooling in the pause, but he covers the hand idling on his waist and guides it to his length, raw and vulnerable. “Lethallin.”  
  
It probably says something terrible about him that this is what rallies him into action, but Solas takes the obnoxiously-given cue anyway and kneads at his cock, then pinches the end of one of the ties on his breeches and gently pulls the knot free. Everything goes silent again, Lavellan's ribs so still Solas fears he's stopped breathing before the placket loosens and Lavellan gasps, already damp and pulsing when Solas shunts aside his smalls and takes him in hand.  
  
His surrender is absolute. What must he look like from a kinder angle, his eyes lidded and unseeing, the muscles in his stomach and arms drawn up like whipcord—Solas twists his shaft in his fist and licks the bruise at his neck, unable to deliberate on the image for too long before Lavellan begins to squirm. Slow with reluctance, Solas unspools their legs at his insistence, not sure where he's going with it a moment before he feels Lavellan's free arm haltingly trail behind him.  
  
Before he can move any further, Solas catches his wrist, guiding it away with an apologetic kiss to the pulse under his hand. A few inches above, the Anchor throbs. “That privilege is mine.”  
  
“Anytime before the Maker returns to all creation, then,” Lavellan pants, thighs tight in the anticipation of pain. Solas cups his face and draws him back just far enough to touch their lips, passing on the tang of sweat and blood lingering on his own tongue. There will be a time to be cruel to him someday, but not now; Solas hooks his fingers in the waistband of his breeches and lets Lavellan kick them off his legs all the way before he walks his hand up the inside of his legs, depressing the flesh of his inner thigh, feeling out the give.  
  
He lips reverently along Lavellan's collarbone, his fingers sticky with a grease spell before Lavellan can passive-aggressively offer to do it on his own again. In this, Solas is more careful than Lavellan probably expects him to be, running the pads of two fingers around his sphincter before he slips them inside to the middle knuckle, caught slightly off-guard when his own cock jumps in response to Lavellan tensing again. He doesn't ask for guidance, adding a third finger just before Lavellan is ready to take it and then twists his entire hand hard, selfishly taking his joy when Lavellan reacts just the way he wanted, his throat bobbing around a smothered moan. Promising.  
  
He shifts enough to free up his other arm, where it's been doing nothing productive beyond going numb the entire time, threading his fingers through a handful of Lavellan's hair and tugging it backwards until he can easily scrape at Lavellan's bare throat with his teeth. Seemingly hyperaware of Varric on the other side of the room, Lavellan bears it with a quiet inhale, his core taut and slick where his length drips deliberately over his pubic hair.  
  
“You are doing very well,” Solas assures him, swiveling his wrist again, his fingertips seeking out the slight rise within him and rolling past when he locates it. Unprepared for the sudden assault, Lavellan shivers, an animal sound like a sob resonating out of his chest. “Let me guide you there.”  
  
To this, Lavellan has apparently nothing to say; he reaches back and grips Solas's thigh hard, futilely trying to rip his pants down without turning, stiff where he lays. When Solas can spread his fingers within him, he slips his hand free, pressing his lips to the top of Lavellan's head and gently pulling him back again, chest to back, making quick work of his own hose. Lavellan is practically in a lather, obediently inching up on the bed to compensate for the slight height difference when Solas negotiates them around the limited bedspace and then lines them up.  
  
No one moves. He doesn't mean to antagonize Lavellan, but he wants to enjoy the lull, this single break between moments like the pause after blocking a Venatori bruiser's maul with only a single thin length of staff and lucky footing.  
  
“Do it,” Lavellan rasps tightly, boring a hole into the blanket with his nails. Below them, the fire finally dies. Now the sole source of light in the house, the Anchor floods their wall with pulsing color that ripples like an aurora, painfully obvious in the midnight darkness. It's all he can do to bury a laugh into the back of Lavellan's shoulder when he hears him swear, desperately tucking his arm beneath as many layers of the bedcovers as he can scrabble for, still as a hunter in a blind as they wait for reassurance that they haven't accidentally woken Varric or Blackwall.  
  
Fate has never been so kind to either of them. Solas is acutely aware that Lavellan's blood must be freezing in horror when something scrapes near the general vicinity of the fireplace, and the disembodied sounds resolve into the shadow of Blackwall sleepily groping around for the bellows and then stoking the embers back into flame.  
  
Better; he seals a hand over Lavellan's mouth and pushes in, seating completely in one fluid thrust that blurs his vision and pushes him close to a brink he hadn't expected to be anywhere near yet.  
  
“ _Elgar'nan'enaste_ ,” Lavellan mouths into his palm, furnace-hot within and without, the muscles of his shoulders bunching and slackening dramatically in the half-light. The danger of drawing Blackwall's attention keeps him from interfering with the itinerary Solas has for the both of them, but there is only so much risk they're both willing to court, so Solas grips the lower half of his face so hard that he can feel the individual outlines of his teeth against his fingertips, how tightly Lavellan's jaw is locked, and then begins to move.  
  
It's not elaborate, but that seems to suit Lavellan fine. He moves to sate a need, winding his unengaged arm tight around Lavellan's chest, dragging himself so far back as to nearly leave Lavellan altogether before sinking back in, a sensation like free-fall turning in his stomach at each thrust. It punches the air out of Lavellan, his nostrils flaring around his sparse, short breaths above the hard border Solas's hand cuts over his face.  
  
Accidentally asphyxiating the Inquisitor isn't on the docket for tonight, so he loosens his grip, grinding to a painful halt until he can be sure Lavellan can manage himself. Instead, Lavellan parts his lips and maneuvers two of Solas's fingers into his mouth, the flat of his tongue catching on the barely-there edges of his nails in the rush to get situated. For a moment they simply exist that way, vaguely conscious of Blackwall settling back down to sleep again, winded and dizzy, but Lavellan gently taps his hips back, and the balance shifts again.  
  
It's not enough anymore; Solas pants damply into Lavellan's hair, gliding into him with enough momentum that he forces Lavellan onto his stomach, wedging a knee under Lavellan's thigh and blanketing the full length of his body with his own. It almost disgusts him, how much he needs this, how eagerly he waits on Lavellan's approval, how it sends him halfway to orgasm when Lavellan moans and he can feel it in his hand. The bedframe lists, the straw in the mattress snaps, a trail of sweat stings one of his eyes, but all that matters is Lavellan sucking desperately on his fingers, unmarked hand pulling at his cock, too far gone to do anything but let himself be had, and Solas above him, his hips working and working and working.  
  
Lavellan comes hard enough that Solas can see the Anchor flare through the blankets, open-mouthed but completely soundlessly, body pitching backwards in search of a last friendly increment of friction. With no reasonable defense against the image Lavellan makes in complete surrender, Solas gives in, takes Lavellan's hips in both hands, and slams forward one last time, feeling more than seeing the room tilt as he lets himself fall to the side to avoid crushing him.  
  
_That was probably ill-advised_ , he thinks mildly when the world bleeds into his awareness again, in no mood for an in-depth dissection of all the ways this will almost certainly backfire on him very soon when Lavellan is coming to beside him, the agitated flickering of the Anchor slowly fading to dormancy.  
  
“Where does a drifting elven apostate learn to do that?” he says at last, a tired smile pulling at the corner of his swollen mouth.  
  
“I could ask the same.”  
  
“Solas, please just take the compliment.”  
  
“Then I am flattered,” he concedes, pressing Lavellan back down when he sits up to fix their blanket heap to do it himself, the mattress now in desperate need of adjusting where the stuffing has been pressed nearly flat beneath Lavellan and Solas's combined weight. It's better than they've had since they left Skyhold two weeks ago, and Lavellan would never think to be bothered by it, but Solas lays down again and pulls Lavellan to him before either of them can stage a retreat all the same.  
  
“Lavellan,” he begins. “I think—”  
  
“I'm not asking for anything in stone yet,” he murmurs with a readiness that tells Solas he's probably had this prepared for a while, letting himself be maneuvered, shivering when Solas's leg brushes the drying wet spot on his thigh. “Let it be what it is for now.”  
  
It's a kinder offer than the one he would have given himself, and Lavellan is a solid weight in his arms, already half-asleep when Solas looks down at him again. Outside, a last lazy grumble of thunder stirs the mice in the walls before all falls quiet, and Solas lets himself sink into the waiting doorway of the Fade.

**Author's Note:**

> i totally ganked this from a kink meme prompt (which can be found [here](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/15866.html?thread=60886010#t60886010)), but as it didn't match the request on like... three different levels i opted not to post it there lol on the off-chance that anon is around, please accept my apologies (*ﾟｰﾟ)ゞ


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